Many woodworkers lack confidence in their glue joints. The way to overcome this is by getting to know your products and materials. This is accomplished by experimenting and testing – particularly through destructive testing.
I continually test my off-cuts from every project. This provides a form of quality control testing that is specific to each project.
In this video I show a couple of the methods that I use to test my glue joints. Testing your joints to the point of wood fa...

So, I’ve started the bed and its been going pretty good so far. I had all the stock that i had already bought (still need to find a few pieces and pick up the hardward, however its not Really needed until the end, so im not worried about it) resting in the shop for about 10 days which is good! The wood im using for the this project is Poplar, its easy enough to work with, it stains up beautifully, and was readily available and on the lower end of the price market.
Onto the woodworkin...

There are three curved parts in each stool. These are formed by gluing up thin strips to create a thicker laminated part. The three parts are:
1. Seat Back – 7/8” thick (formed with 5 or 6 strips)2. Back Rest – 7/8” thick (formed with 5 or 6 strips)3. Slats – 3/8” thick (formed with 3 or 4 strips) (5 per stool)
As I plan the construction, I start to realize that I have 6 stools with 7 curved parts each. That works out to 42 glue ups. Each one requires...

I have been using this jig for gluing thin material for some time now:
(i think the basic idea was taken from time life’s “art of woodworking”). The jig is basically piece of 19mm hardwood plywood with packing tape cover and 9mm pieces of plywood brad nailed at both ends. the wedges are tapped with a mallet to create the pressure.
Lately, i decided to recycle my thin scrap into coasters, very much like tonyu’s.
Unlike tonyu, i don’t have a lathe (I think...

It was finally time to close up the body of the guitar. Yet another fun clamping operation.Things went reasonably well. The stage is now set for routing the channels for the binding and purfling. Take a look at the post for details. Thanks for reading!

Time to glue up. Since I painstakingly fit each tenon to it’s matching mortise, I was fairly confident that glue-up would go ok. To solve the short clamp issue, I went down to the hardware store & got some couplers to hook pipes together to get more length out of my pipe clamps. Also, I borrowed some longer parallel clamps from a friend – and I’m glad he had them!
I did a dry assembly & everything worked great.
It was a little tricky to do by myself, but I g...

I was looking for a clamp that could hold a glue up of two 45 deg strips of wood to make a block. Basically two triangles glued together to make a square. All the woodworking site searches produced nothing. Then I came across these clamps on a welding website.
http://www.stronghandtools.com/products/pdt_img/pgv_pic.html
I ordered three of them from my local welding supply store to see how they would work. The man at the supply store had never seen them, apparently they have a patent...

In planning to glue to corners I cut some angle blocks to assist in holding the clamps in place.
I also used a special clamp for angles that I highly recommend if you have to glue up unusual corners or large miter corners.
I then tried to figure out how to cut the bottom and shelf. I decided to use my circular saw. Before having a table saw, I used a circular saw to cut the wood so I have a good blade for plywood. I also own a forrest blade but I didn’t use it for this, d...

There are some jobs that must be done as you go along; they will be very difficult to do once the back frame is glued up.Unfortunately, I am one of those people who must see results and can’t wait indefinitely to see a frame going together. Apart from the fact that I think someone said “A decision deferred is a decision well made” I have two excuses for this less than grown up behaviour.a) Sanding every square millimetre can be pointless if it turns out that there is a final curve or detai...